Transportation Systems Resilience: Capacity-Aware Control and Value of Information

Resilience of a transportation system is its ability to operate under adverse events like incidents and storms. Availability of real-time traffic data provides new opportunities for predicting travelers’ routing behavior and implementing network control operations during adverse events. In this talk, we will discuss two problems: controlling highway corridors in response to disruptions and modeling strategic route choices of travelers with heterogeneous access to incident information. Firstly, we present an approach to designing control strategies for highway corridors facing stochastic capacity disruptions such random incidents and vehicle platoons/moving bottlenecks. We exploit the properties of traffic flow dynamics under recurrent incidents to derive verifiable conditions for stability of traffic queues, and also obtain guarantees on the system throughput. Secondly, we introduce a routing game in which travelers receive asymmetric and incomplete information about uncertain network state, and make route choices based on their private beliefs about the state and other travelers’ behavior. We study the effects of information heterogeneity on travelers’ equilibrium route choices and costs. Our analysis is useful for evaluating the value of receiving state information for travelers, which can be positive, zero, or negative in equilibrium. These results demonstrate the advantages of considering network state uncertainty in both strategic and operational aspects of system resilience.